Revisiting the JFK assassination 50 years later, how would leagues and media react today?

Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum sits empty Nov. 23, 1963, after the cancellation of the USC-UCLA football game, a day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Just three years earlier, Kennedy accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president at the same site. Photo by Tom Courtney/Los Angeles Public Library Herald-Examiner collection

Bob Costas was 11 years old and in his sixth-grade classroom on Long Island in New York, on Friday afternoon, Nov. 22, 1963.

“Like all kids, we were anticipating the weekend,” Costas recalled. “But when our teacher, Mr. Tomassi, told us the president has been shot, the room fell silent — except for a few kids who raised their hands to ask him what he knew about the president’s condition, what happens if he dies ...”

The fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms were not part of the main school building, which allowed Mr. Tomassi to pull his car up against a wall beneath the classroom window. He opened the car door and turned the radio volume up loud enough so everyone inside could hear more information as it became available.

“Just about the time we were in line to get on the buses to go home, confirmation of the president’s death came,” Costas continued. “I remembered that on the bus ride home, the usual laughing and joking and high spiritedness were pretty much absent. It wasn’t complete silence, but the change in the atmosphere was undeniable.”

Back home, Costas could watch on the family black-and-white television the coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on a 24/7 basis.

Not far away, at the NFL’s New York offices, commissioner Pete Rozelle was trying to gather more information about whether the games should go on that Sunday.

They did. And ever since then, the narrative has ebbed and flowed about whether Rozelle, a one-time Los Angeles Rams public relations director, had the public’s best interests in mind.

Fifty years later, revisiting all that went into the decision — as Costas has done on his NBC Sports Network “Costas Tonight” show — as well as vignettes collated on the NFL’s own network and website shed new perspective and context, especially when examining whether the media played any kind of role in the decisions eventually made.

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First, it should be noted while it’s a fact all seven NFL games were played as scheduled Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963 — including the Rams’ game at the Coliseum against Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts — none of them was televised by CBS, the only network that had a TV contract with the league. All games did go out on the radio to the local markets.

By a fluke, there were no games scheduled in either Dallas, where the assassination took place, or in Washington D.C., as the Cowboys and Redskins were on the road.

Just 10 minutes before the East Coast games were to start, live TV captured the shooting of alleged assailant Lee Harvey Oswald during his prison transfer. It made that decision to play on look even more calloused.

What outcry there was from the sports media giants at the time did not seem to affect attendance at the games. When Roman Gabriel and the Rams edged the Colts, 17-16, the attendance was slightly more than 48,000, about the normal draw for the team during a down season.

A day earlier, the Coliseum was empty. The same site where Kennedy accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1960 was supposed to be bursting with noise for the USC-UCLA football game. That contest was pushed back to Nov. 30.

In Costas’ special called “No Day For Games: The Cowboys and JFK,” the title is taken straight off a newspaper column written by Bud Shrake for the Dallas Morning News, after the Cowboys went to Cleveland and lost, 27-17.

His lead: “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching or writing about.” He blamed Rozelle as “using an excuse the irrelevant fact” that Kennedy was a football fan and sportsman to go ahead.

Red Smith, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, also railed against the New York Giants’ game to be played at Yankee Stadium:

“In the civilized world, it was a day of mourning. In the National Football League, it was the 11th Sunday of the business year, a quarter-million day in Yankee Stadium, a day for selling to television a show which that medium not always celebrated for sensitive taste — couldn’t stomach.”

That excerpt comes from a recent book by Dr. Michael H. Gavin called “Sports in the Aftermath of Tragedy: From Kennedy to Katrina,” the result of a dissertation on how the sports media in particular form narratives that influence public perception in the wake of tragic, national events.

Gavin said it was somewhat surprising to him that outside of Smith, or Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Arthur Daley, he did not find a sizable media backlash to Rozelle’s decision.

“When you experience a national tragedy these days — 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or the bombings in Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 — and sports is involved, you always hear people refer back to the Kennedy assassination and how everyone was saying and writing about how it was a terrible decision for the NFL to play,” said the 37-year-old Gavin, who works in academic administration at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Md.

“When I did the research, I anticipated seeing a plethora of articles really condemning that decision. But there’s really none of that. Smith and Daley had a huge amount of power and readership, so maybe it causes people to misremember how it was perceived at the time.

“I think it’s more fair to say the players didn’t want to play. But there’s even more anecdotally that fans were generally OK with the games, attendance was as expected, and some remember wondering if they could get a ticket to a game given that others may not have wanted to go.

“What surprised me more was that by the time the Army-Navy game was played (on Dec. 7), most of the sportswriters were writing about how this was the right way to honor Kennedy.”

That seems to even deviate a bit from a piece Charles P. Pierce wrote in Sports Illustrated titled “Black Sunday” on the 40th anniversary of how the NFL reacted to Kennedy’s death. Pierce said it “became clear that Rozelle’s golden touch with the media had deserted him. He was barbecued for going ahead with the schedule.” Pierce cited Smith, and includes a line from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner’s Mel Durslag that called the NFL games that weekend “a sick joke.”

Costas said his sense today is “most fans and members of the media were not, and are not, harshly critical of Rozelle’s decision. They may have disagreed with it, but they recognize that what we sometimes see as the right choice, upon reflection, is not necessarily what we do in the heat and confusion of them moment.

“None of us are perfect, but Rozelle was a good man, and a good commissioner, and I think most people realize that his intentions were good — even if he later recognized it as a mistake.”

NFL Films producer Brian Rosenfeld, as part of a series available on NFL.com/JFK as well as shown on the NFL Network, pulled a 1978 clip from CBS’ Super Bowl pregame show out of the vault to show the late Rozelle explaining first-hand that what he did “was obviously a mistake. I wish we had not played those games.”

The piece also includes a 1997 snippet from late Raiders owner Al Davis, who admitted he told the American Football League that he would not play that Sunday. The AFL shut down.

“Once the AFL said it wasn’t going to play, college football didn’t play, it still puzzles me a bit why (Rozelle) heads down, tails up still made that decision,” said Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor and network reporter on the scene in Dallas, in the NFL Network piece.

The 33-year-old Rosenfeld said learning more about what happened long before he was born drove his own curiosity, but the key to his piece was wanting to look at “what people were thinking back then and why, 50 years later, they may have still had the same thoughts. We wanted to get some perspective on how things went then and now.

“I wasn’t trying to put the NFL’s, or anyone else’s spin, on this. My job was to document what happened and ask people questions. If everyone had said it was horrible or great, we’d tell that story. We didn’t ask any leading questions. And we got both sides of it, including some great material of a fan who actually attended a game that day in Philadelphia and admitted ‘Nobody knew why we were there.’ ”

Art Spander, a Pro Football Hall of Fame columnist, UCLA grad and L.A. native, was writing at the now-gone Santa Monica Outlook in 1963. He wrote in a recent blog post (artspander.com) about how he did his USC-UCLA preview story, but after the assassination he was dispatched to collect reactions from people “whose disbelief was no greater than mine.”

There wasn’t immediate word whether the game would go on as planned for Saturday.

“John McKay, then the Trojans coach, was opposed,” Spander wrote. “ ‘I can’t believe you’d play a football game,’ he said, ‘where there was only half the enthusiasm.’ We didn’t. For a week.”

Spander also noted as much as Rozelle was criticized for that decision, he was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year in 1963, more for his gambling suspensions of Paul Hornung and Alex Karras.

How would Rozelle have reacted today? With 50 years of history having passed and more tragedy to deal with, sports leaders have the mainstream media as well as social media to weigh.

Would Rozelle had done things differently if there were a mob of reporters outside his door tweeting his every move, with ESPN reporters quoting its insiders saying it could go one way or another?

“Every situation, be it the ’72 Munich Olympics, 9/11, or the assassination of a political figure, has its own separate dynamics and circumstances,” said Costas, whose special repeats on NBCSN on Friday (3:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.) and Saturday (4 p.m.).

Gavin said he likes to think the media today is far more sophisticated than it was 50 years ago — not just because of the social media boom, “but by so many of the media people having dual careers in print and TV, and it’s a profession now that has many diverse voices.

“Absolutely, you’d get sportswriters who go gauge the pulse first of what their public calls for, but I think it also depends on the tragedy. If it’s related to Obama or Katrina, there are racial elements to discuss. In 1963, the narrative was more whitewashed, even though we had a president who wanted to integrate sports.

“They say his assassination was a time of lost innocence, as if there was innocence beforehand.”

RECORD, PAUSE, DELETE

Gauging the media’s high- and low-level marks of the week, and what’s ahead:

IN TUNE

Rick Neuheisel’s multi-media career as a Pac-12 Network college football analyst may play out as far as his acoustic guitar will take him. The former UCLA head coach has composed tribute songs this season for Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel (to the Marty Robbins’ classic “El Paso”) and one heralding the Southeastern Conference (to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”) and debuted them on Dan Patrick’s syndicated radio show. At the bequest of the Pac-12 Network, Neuheisel recorded his latest effort and had it posted Wednesday night. It was an ode to interim USC football coach Ed Orgeron called “Eddie O” (sung to the tune of the Harry Belafonte’s famous “Banana Boat Song,” highlighted by the “Day-O” lines). Find it online at Pac12.com/videos. “That was all in one take,” Neuheisel confirmed Thursday. The guitar strumming began mostly on Patrick’s show as a lark, but has evolved into something more into entering the Weird Al Yankovic genre. “I enjoy this role as a serious analyst in the studio, but it’s also a fun way to talk about what’s going on in another way,” Neuheisel said. “These songs just kind of happen. That USC victory over Stanford was one for the ages and the momentum following it was huge for that program.”

FINE TUNING

Dan Dierdorf’s decision this week to announce the end of his national NFL broadcasting career after 30 seasons at CBS and ABC has much less to do with feeling he’s not been on his game and more to do with the realities of getting through airports on a weekly basis. It’s a situation we’ve heard more often with broadcasters at this point in their careers — most notably what led to Keith Jackson’s retirement after the 2006 USC-Texas national title game at the Rose Bowl. With two artificial knees, two artificial hips and needing a cane to get around, the 64-year-old Dierdorf, a Pro Football Hall of Famer as a player and broadcaster, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “physically it’s reached the point where it’s almost too difficult for me to travel.” Say what you will about Dierdorf’s work over the years, but his spot on the No. 2 CBS roster with Greg Gumbel was well-deserved. Interesting suggestion on replacing Dierdorf would be moving Boomer Esiason from the studio to the booth, but he also has commitments to “Monday Night Football” radio games and his own daily New York radio show.

TUNED OUT

Fox may have had some justified cause to switch L.A. viewers away last Sunday from its Philadelphia-Washington coverage, as the Eagles were coasting with a 24-0 lead in the third quarter, over to a more compelling Detroit-Pittsburgh 21-21 game. But two things happened to sabotage that move: The Redskins came back in the fourth quarter to make it an eight-point game (they had just scored two touchdowns and made two-point conversions), and the 24-16 outcome wasn’t clinched until an Eagles interception in the final minutes. Fox stayed to see the Steelers rally for two fourth-quarter touchdowns in the final 4:46 to overcome the Lions, 37-27. Those Eagles or Redskins fans living in L.A. could not access the game on DirecTV’s “NFL Sunday Ticket” because of it already was locked into Fox’s selection for the L.A. market. Eagles fans also point out this probably was the biggest win of the season for the 6-5 leaders of the NFC East and ended a 10-game home losing streak. Fox spokesman Dan Bell acknowledged the network was going from “a non-competitive game at the time to a very competitive game, and our goal is always to provide the most compelling match-up.” NFL TV flex rules allow for a network to switch games if a) it’s in the third quarter and b) there is at least an 18-point difference. However, once the switch is made, they can’t go back. That’s the rule. “We always get a balance of complaints, especially in L.A., when this happens,” Bell said. “There were likely just as many people complaining why we weren’t switching from the Eagles’ game to the Steelers’ game at that time. Sometimes, it doesn’t always go as planned.”